Tonight on Live at Five, Russell Biven did a great job of covering the story that we have been sharing here, here, and here. As you can see in the video, the roofers are hammering in the final pieces of slate. With a few final touches, the bridge will be done. During filming, Jeremy said that he will be finishing the Part IV of the bridge installment soon, so check back for the latest updates.
That time had finally arrived! It was time to install the arches. So much time and heart had gone into the arches that it was exciting to see a reward soon coming. The timbers proved more difficult than I had anticipated. They had now been off the form for more than a month and had been stored outdoor the entire time. While installing the first arch, we found that the first one had sprung in the last three feet of the timber. This in turn pushed up the tangent point that was established on the drawings. I wanted to do keep the arches as much as a true arc as possible. We forced some of the spring back and eliminated nearly all of the error. We then used the forklift to place a load onto the arches and bolted them. This created upward thrust from the arches to the panel posts, and in essence, placed most of the load onto the arches. After a couple of days of hard work, all the arches were installed and load bearing! This was the pinnacle of the project.
While we were tailoring the final quirks of the project, Dennis and Brian started to build the wing walls of the abutments with river stone. The roofing crew was soon to come and during this phase was when channel ten filmed for their live at five show.
I hired Mr. Kelley Hunter to help with building these massive arches on Monday, February 5th. Kelley and Adam started setting up shop in the hay storage shed on-site. I helped them along with getting the form built and my mind was jumping with anticipation as I could see those arches in my head even more clearly now that the form was ready to go! When we started milling lumber we soon realized that our power source was inadequate so we used the help of a fine electrician, Mr. Ken, and he set us up nicely to continue full steam ahead.
After what seemed to be endless preparation on our shop, we finally were ready to begin lamination of the arches. We had made a makeshift clamping system and on Wednesday, February 14th, it was finally tested and we had our first two laminations glued and clamped. There was a sense of excitement and anticipation as we saw the oak being placed on the form. A little more tweaking and the system was ready for full production.
The arches, when complete, will reach a mere 48 feet and four inches. With four arches total, we have a total of 193 feet and four inches of arch to laminate. There will be over 3200 lineal feet of 1 X 8 red oak totaling around 8000 pounds of oak arches! We are using 16 laminations to reach our 12 inch thickness.
The first arch was ready to be removed from the form after three days of work but remained until I was able to have a forklift delivered on-site. The beam reacted superbly when it was lifted, keeping its form quite well and no cracking was herd. On February the twenty first, we placed the beam on benches for prep.
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